Hey Seattle, want a gigabit connection? That’ll be $80

Gigabit Squared, the company that’s working with the city of Seattle to light up the city’s dark fiber has announced pricing, and that the service will be available next year. A gigabit connection will cost $80 plus a $350 connection fee (unless you sign up for a full year of service). That’s $10 more than Google charges in Kansas City, and about $15 more than what I pay for 30Mbps downstream/10Mbps upstream cable broadband here in Austin, Texas.

From the Gigabit Squared blog post:

Gigabit Squared today unveiled residential pricing for the ultra-high-speed fiber-to-the-home broadband network it plans to launch locally in 2014. The Gigabit Squared fiber network will initially be made available to neighborhoods located within the West Campus District, First Hill, Capitol Hill and Central Area of Seattle as part of a program called Gigabit Seattle.

Here are the three service plans detailed by the Gigabit Squared blog post:

Free service at speeds of 5 Mbps downstream and 1 Mbps upstream (its comparable to traditional DSL speeds) for five years. After 60 months renters or owners can convert to a 10 Mbps download/10 Mbps upload service plan for only $10 per month. However, there is a $350 installation charge, but it transfers to new home owners or renters.

A medium tier offer symmetrical 100 Mbps service for $45 per month. As with the gigabit service, the $350 connection fee is waived if people sign a one-year contract.

A superfast gigabit tier with symmetrical gigabit per second speeds for $80 per month.

That’s a price plan that will undercut the cable providers — such as Comcast, which is the dominant cable provider in the Seattle area — on the 100 Mbps side and make the gigabit service look reasonable enough that early adopters are likely to sign up. For details on the planned network roll out (including the Wi-Fi component) check out this post I wrote in December.